Speaking at the valedictory function of the two-day CIC convention, vice president Hamid Ansari highlighted several shortcomings in the Right to Information Act.
Four years after the RTI Act came into force, lack of mandatory monitoring mechanism for its implementation remains an important "lacunae" while government agencies are shying from disclosure of subsidies data worth several crores of rupees, vice president Hamid Ansari said today.
Speaking at the valedictory function of the two-day CIC convention here, Ansari highlighted several shortcomings in the Right to Information Act which continue to plague the implementation of the transparency legislation in the country.
"An important lacuna has been the lack of a mandatory monitoring mechanism to look at the implementation of the RTI Act and to ensure that the Act is implemented in letter and spirit.
Currently, the media and civil society groups are undertaking this task on an ad hoc basis," he said. He said Section 4 of the RTI Act mandates every public authority to publish the manner of execution of subsidy programmes, including the amounts allocated and details of beneficiaries.
"This is a significant step when one considers that the total quantum of subsidies provided by the central and state governments to the citizens in the country exceeds Rs2,00,000 crore. While such a process has been initiated with respect to NREGA, significant work remains to be done on this issue," he said.
"There are still doubts about the validity of decisions taken by individual Commissioners due to a notion that a full bench of the Information Commission should hear the case that comes before it," Ansari said. He said there were issues in the functioning of the Central and the State information commissions which are working in "relative isolation" as their decisions were not available in a systematic manner or in real time to the general public or even to others.
Ansari said that the information given by the agencies are "marked by inconsistency and unevenness." He added that the government agencies were not following the practise of suo-motu disclosure of crucial information on their web site or in public domain as mandated under section four of the RTI Act.
Ansari said RTI Act was till now not available in all the 22 languages listed in the Constitution of India. "This issue needs to be addressed at the earliest. Empowerment would be meaningless if it is sought to be achieved through a language that the citizen does not understand," Ansari said.
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